Thursday, 13 November 2014

Most of us
go through life trying to reconcile the rational part of our brain with our
emotional gut instinct. You know you really
should go for that run, but something
tells you that it’s going to be very cold and unpleasant out there tonight and
it just isn’t going to happen.

Ed Miliband
really should be the next Prime
Minister.All the electoral arithmetic is in his favour because of the nature
of the first-past-the-post electoral system and the concentration of his
traditional voters in towns and cities. He can actually win an outright
majority with a lower share of the popular vote than you might imagine.
Probably somewhere in the mid-30s. Not too much of an ask after five years of
austerity, you might think.

Ed has come
up with a decent set of policy proposals too. In his speech and subsequent
emails today, he outlines plans to reverse the Tory tax cuts for millionaires,
to freeze electricity bills, reform the banks and raise the minimum wage. Amen
to all that.

But there’s
a problem.Although he is set to win on paper. many people don't feel it in their water. This includes, of course, three quarters of the Parliamentary Labour Party, which
is why we’ve had such a dose of the pre-election heebie-jeebies over the past
10 days.

Sometimes,
the whole can be less than the sum of its parts. Ed Miliband is the guy who ticks all the
boxes when you present him as a future boyfriend. He has a steady job, no
criminal convictions, minds his Ps and Qs and seems very respectable. But your
mum thinks you can do better. It’s not that she can fault him on any specifics.
It’s just that he’s lacking a certain something and she isn’t able to put her
finger on it.

Politics is
absolutely brutal like this. Miliband is a decent man with worthy motives, but
when he says he sees a Prime Minister staring back at him in the mirror, some cynics may start to wonder whether pressure of work has delayed his annual check-up with
the optician.

There’s a
story being spun by his minders right now, which goes something like this: Ed
is the victim of a concerted smear campaign because he is challenging vested
interests. Here’s a man who threatened
the media with regulation, told the energy companies they’d have to freeze
their prices and that he’d crack down on banking excesses. No wonder, his
supporters say, he’s become a scapegoat.

In pursuing
this argument, Ed’s supporters are in danger of treating the electorate as
fools. While I’m not naive enough to think that these vested interests are
praying for a Labour victory, I don’t for one moment believe they see Miliband
as the slightest threat.

Take the
freezing of energy prices for 18 months, for instance. Some big players in the sector have already
adjusted their charges to take account of the possible imposition of a new
regime. And they are so profitable that they can happily wait until 2017 for
another price hike. The proposed
regulation of the press after Leveson failed to materialise and I don’t for one
moment think that Labour would prioritise this after a victory in 2015.

Think back
to 1997. Tony Blair won the support of the media and the wider business establishment
despite pledging a windfall tax on the ‘excess profits of the privatised
utilities’. Funny how he could tackle vested interests and win a landslide
victory, isn’t it?

Looking back
at the manifesto of 1997 though, one of the most striking things about it is actually
the positive feel of all the pledges and policies. It was highly aspirational
in a motherhood and apple pie kind of way. Contrast this with the first four promises on my email from Miliband
today, which are to ‘scrap, scrap, scrap and reverse’ things that the Tories
have done.

Ed is still
too much speaking to the core Labour supporter who hates everything the coalition
stands for. Sadly, it’s the strategy that brought defeat to Labour in the 1980s
rather than the strategy which brought them victory in the 1990s. So while my
rational brain keeps telling me that common sense will prevail and the maths
will work itself out, a butterfly menagerie is busily flapping away in my
stomach.